Loren Eiseley Quotes

People are always afraid of the unknown - and banding together against the Thing That Is Different From Us is a time-honoured tradition for rallying the masses.

In its worse forms, conservatism is a matter of 'I hate strangers and anything that's different.'

Chronically insecure people easily lose their altruism, tolerance, and respect for non-conformity. If they have no alternative on offer, they can be led to attribute their plight to strangers in their midst.

We live in a society that is afraid of ways of being it doesn't understand.

Discomfort levels in our societies are rising, or so it would seem. In theory, we invoke diversity and tolerance. But in real life, we raise our hackles and withdraw into ourselves.

Birds of a lawless, bigoted feather bully together.

I think, we all learned that when we are afraid it's easy to want to blame, and the people we want to blame are the people who don't look like us.

Man is not man, but a wolf to those he does not know.

With most people, strangers are not only enemies, but inferiors.

New opinions are always suspected, and usually opposed, without any other reason but because they are not already common

An ethnic minority is much more vulnerable when it is accused of being a fifth column.

A society which emphasizes uniformity is one which creates intolerance and hate.

Most racist people are like sheep. They are people without backbones.

They play it safe, are quick to assassinate what they do not understand. They move in packs, ingesting more and more fear with every act of hate on one another.

Our love of lockstep is our greatest curse, the source of all that bedevils us. It is the source of homophobia, xenophobia, racism, sexism, terrorism, bigotry of every variety and hue, because it tells us there is one right way to do things, to look, to behave, to feel, when the only right way is to feel your heart hammering inside you and to listen to what its timpani is saying.

As a child growing up in San Francisco in the 1950s, I sometimes met insults when I ventured outside of Chinatown or my neighborhood. I have even been spat on and threatened with a knife. I could have let my anger fester until it became hate. However, I realized they were isolated incidents, and I simply got on with my life.

Americans are xenophobic, they will believe their own people rather than the adversary, even a friendly enemy voice.

Exactly Straight women who surround themselves only with gay men or white people who refuse any other race into their circles are unhealthy and it has more to do with one's individual fear and individual closets.

Yeah, I make fun of blacks, and why not? I'm not a black.

You tend to be afraid when someone seems foreign to you. But if you aren't careful, that can lead to bigotry.

As a society, we pick words that are offensive based on what we're most afraid of. We associate sounds with some dangerous idea, and right now the most dangerous thing to us are the differences between us.

It is dangerous when you start calling people from one part of the world terrorists or fanatic, and you reduce them to some abstract notion. If evil has a geographical place, and if the evil has a name, that is the beginning of fascism. Real life is not this way. You have fanatics and narrow-minded people everywhere.

Yesterday's news feeds our fear that our neighbours are more likely than not to be bad eggs: benefit fraudsters, bogus asylum seekers, paedophiles or jihadist terrorists.

We have a tendency to condemn people who are different from us, to define their sins as paramount and our own sinfulness as being insignificant.

We're frightened of what makes us different.